Digital Marketing for Competitive Markets

STRATEGY

Although we work with many innovative companies selling technology-based solutions, many of our client companies are selling commodity-like services and products in highly competitive markets. Not every company we work with, as it turns out, has proverbial black box that turns crap into gold via some proprietary alchemy.

Some examples include rental tools, oilfield services and IT managed services. These businesses are important, because they are helping typically large companies meet established and known needs, and they face different marketing challenges than technology-focused companies.

Legacy markets are big, but the barriers to entry are typically low, meaning that there might be anywhere between 15-25 different companies vying for any single opportunity. In these hyper-competitive situations, marketers need cost-effective solutions to maximize their opportunities for success.

Competing Priorities

The primary factors of competition in highly competitive markets, not in any particular order, are availability, price, quality and service. Since these priorities often compete with each other, maintaining a balance is key to being successful.

Marketing communications must be aligned with each of these factors, but instead of marketing the benefits of adopting a disruptive technology, the primary marketing challenges for companies in highly competitive markets are developing and maintaining awareness and interest over the long term.

Successful B2B marketers in mature industries are tasked with these priorities:

Maintaining a low cost of customer acquisition.
Communicating through multiple channels.
Maintaining a persistent and pervasive message – be everywhere all the time so you are top of mind when the customer is ready to buy.
Aligning marketing communications with the corporate buying cycle. Your marketing for next year’s contracts begins this spring.
Ranking on Page 1 of Google for the keywords that you excel at.

Strategies for Success

Digital Marketing. There is no more cost-effective marketing communications strategy than digital. Nearly all B2B buyers use the Internet to research and compare alternatives. For most buyers, the primary source of information on a company is the company itself – you! In fact, Marketing Charts reported that two-thirds (65%) of B2B buyers claim that vendor websites are one of their most highly influential content types.

From a simple cost per click or impression standpoint, the Digital Marketing option is simply the least expensive, most targeted and easiest to measure. All that adds-up to keeping customer acquisition costs low.

Visibility Management. Generating and maintaining awareness in competitive markets is crucial to maximizing your opportunities for success. If you miss 100% of the pitches you never swing at, you will lose every opportunity you never bid on. To maximize the number of opportunities you get invited to compete on, you have to be found. In the online battle for placement in organic Google searches, you have to leverage the right technology to maximize your placement on critical keyword searches and reserve your digital ad budget for high-value, high-volume keywords that you can’t dominate with your own website SEO.

Protip: Don’t pay for Google Ads using your company name as a keyword. You should already have top of page placement in searches using your company name. If not, call us, you have a problem!

Master “Local” SEO: Local SEO is a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy that helps your business be more visible in local search results on Google. Any business that has a physical location or serves a geographic area should benefit from local SEO.

Influencing the influencers. Educating and informing the companies that use your products and services in the solutions they design for big, established buyers can be an effective long-term strategy. Think of systems integrators, consultants, engineering firms and government contractors. Building awareness and interest with these potential channel partners can help get you into buying opportunities that you never would have been able to access on your own.

Leveraging channels. Especially in international markets, developing a channel partner marketing program complete with white label marketing collateral, customized landing pages and localized messaging can develop a preference with your partners and drive more volume through them.

Consistency. In our experience, lack of consistency is the most common reason why marketing programs fail. A Digital Marketing “initiative” that consists of sending one or two email campaigns a year, making a few LinkedIn posts each month and then calling it a day will universally fail to move the needle. We have heard the comment from some marketers that they want to take a “rifle shot” approach to marketing and communicate only at the right time to the right audience, rather than a “shotgun scatter” approach. We are on-board 100% with targeting a relevant audience, but in hyper-competitive markets you have to communicate all the time!

Why? The old “Rule of Seven” prescribed that a prospect needed to be touched seven times over an 18-month period before they turned into a lead. That was when the sales rep had much more control over the buying process. Today, much more of the buying process occurs online, outside the influence of the sales rep, and the number of required touches – both physical and digital – is now much higher. Some estimates put the number of touches as high as 20! Our take is that in competitive markets, there is no arbitrary magic number, making consistency all the more important.

Protip: Choose the right marketing cadence that fits your resource availability and budget, but if you are going to devote time, resources and money to marketing, make a commitment you can keep with achievable goals to keep morale high. At a minimum, commit to two blog articles a month, two LinkedIn posts per week and one email campaign per month.

Why It Matters

A critical challenge for many small to medium-sized businesses operating in highly competitive markets is finding the time and/or budget to execute an ongoing, consistent marketing communications effort. It matters because your business matters to your customers, employees and to you.

Find the time and budget something to market, even if that budget consists of spending one hour a week on LinkedIn connecting with potential buyers.

Of course this is a self-serving comment, but if your schedule is consumed by serving customers and managing the business, find a Digital Marketing agency with multiple capabilities that can be tailored to your budget. A flexible agency can help you achieve your most important priorities today and grow with you as dictated by success.

Let’s Talk! Schedule a free 30-minute Digital Marketing consultation to see if there is a fit between your marketing challenges and our capabilities.

Book a Meeting!

About Prism Group

Prism Group is a full-spectrum, multi-talented B2B agency focused on Energy Tech, Technology, Energy, Services and Media markets. Our work is telling stories that matter, because our clients are working to change the world for the better. What makes us different is that we put into action the strategies we recommend – we get it done, so you can get results and increase the value of your business.